I COULD NOT WAIT

After solving several more technical problems [with the aid of Google], I managed to convert my Windows Movie Maker "project" to an MP4 file, suitable for uploading to YouTube.  That done, I got carried away, and instead of waiting until next week, went ahead and uploaded it [long process!]  So, my first lecture is now available, twitches and all, under the title "Robert Paul Wolff Ideological Critique Lecture One."

I will be very interested in opinions, negative as well as positive.

THE HIDDEN DANGERS OF BINGE WATCHING

A while back, I discovered that I had somehow acquired Amazon Prime, which gives me access to Netflix-style original movies and series.  In late December, I stumbled on Mozart in the Jungle, and quickly binge-watched on my computer all ten half-hour episodes.  What was not to love?  Classical music, sex, and afternoon Soap style plotting.  At the end of the last episode was a message that Season Two would be available on December 30th. 

Well, I have just finished watching episode 10 of Season Two, and now I suddenly realize that I shall have to wait roughly 360 days for Season Three!  That does not seem fair at all.

Who knew?

WHEW

This is nerve-wracking.  I tried to replay the first lecture I had recorded and discovered that there was nothing on my computer.  It had evaporated.  After a frantic half-hour, it occurred to me that it was still on the camcorder, so I erased everything from my computer [all the empty files], and went through the entire process again, transferring the lecture to the computer [in two files, for some mysterious reason], splicing the second onto the first, trimming the beginning and end off, and saving it all with the title "Robert Paul Wolff Ideological Critique Lecture One," which I presume is how it will appear once I upload it to YouTube.

This technology is like a Hopi Rain Dance -- if you do everything right, it rains, and if it doesn't rain, you know you did something wrong but you don't know what.  How do you young people stand it?

A REPLY TO CHRIS

Chris asks:

"You acknowledge that who you are as a person is very much shaped by, in the traditional Marxist sense, the socio-economic and historical location of your birth. That you would not be RPW if you had been born in a middle age monastery, and the development of your psycho-dynamic processes would take on new forms and directions in different historical moments. But, it seems to me that Kant is making an alternative argument that no matter where you were born you would have the same forms of intuition, categories of thought, and in general the same mental apparatus with the same 'understanding' as someone in the past, present, and future. How do you philosophically walk the line, so to speak, between Kantian transcendental subjectivity, and Marxist socio-subjectivity, i.e., it is not the consciousness of men that determines their social life, but their social life that determines their consciousness?"

Ah, well you may ask, grasshopper.  As it happens, I was crafting a portion of one of my Mannheim lectures in my head as I walked this morning in freezing temperatures, and the subject was precisely this question that Chris raises!

My simple answer is that although I will, to my dying day, feel a deep connection with Kant, nevertheless I think Marx is right -- not about the basic forms of sensibility and understanding as they are employed by physicists in their study of the physical universe, but about the forms of sensibility all of us [physicists included] use as we interpret and strive to comprehend the social world.  The focus of my little lecture-in-my-head was the ideological encoding of our experience of space and time themselves.  In my third lecture [probably] I shall expound Mannheim's brilliant explication of the ideological structure of time-consciousness [as opposed to what is in time], followed by my [rather less brilliant] attempt to extend the analysis to space-consciousness as well.  I have not yet attempted an ideological analysis of the Categories [Kant's Pure Concepts of Understanding] in their social application, but that would indeed be a challenging undertaking.

So, my short answer to Chris is, Wait for it!

PATHOLOGICAL NARCISSISM

One of the many things that an aging self-involved philosopher can do on a lazy Saturday afternoon during this interminable four-day weekend is to Google himself.  Google, ever ready to cooperate in the more widespread pathologies, will tell you not only how many sites you appear on but whom else those who searched for you also searched for.  [The degree of cross-correlating of data implied by this is staggering.]

Here is my list:  Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Barrington Moore, Jr., John Stuart Mill, Michael Friedman, Herbert Marcuse, Clarence Irving Lewis, Ronald Dworkin, Willard Van Orman Quine, Georg Friedrich Hegel, Saul Kripke, Milton Friedman.

Does anyone know whom Michael Friedman is?  Hegel?  How did he get in there?

YET MORE RESPONSES TO QUESTIONS

Herewith responses to two thoughtful questions posted by readers:

1.   Professor Rossi asks  --  or re-asks -- this:

"Your view on identity politics seems refreshingly similar to that of critical race theorist Adolph Reed Jr. What do you make of the recent developments at Yale, Mizzou, Oberlin, etc, if I may ask? I reckon the problems are very different from one campus to the next, but the lists of demands are quite similar."

I have hesitated to respond for two reasons:  First, because there seem to me to be two very different issues confused in these protests, and second because I have literally no first-hand experience and very little knowledge of one of them. 

The first issue, with which I am very familiar indeed and with which I have been engaged for most of my career, is the systematic under-representation of, misrepresentation of, covert discrimination against, and outright repression of African-Americans and other non-White populations on college campuses.  I have told stories about some of my experiences in my memoir of my sixteen years in an Afro-American Studies Department, Autobiography of an Ex-White Man.  Seeing first-hand, from the perspective of my new colleagues, the behavior of faculty and administrators on one of the supposedly most politically progressive campuses in America was an education for me, one that I took to heart.

The second issue, with which I have no experience at all, is the rather recent demand by students for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces."  I have an immediate negative visceral reaction to these demands, but that reaction is based on nothing more than headlines, as it were, and I do not trust such reactions in myself any more than I trust them in others.  Until I am actually confronted in a classroom with such a demand and can engage in an extended colloquy with the student making it, I do not think I will understand it well enough to have a reasoned opinion.

2.  MusingMarxist asks:

"I have a question that's very personal because it reflects what I struggle with. You say you felt liberated by your conclusion that one's moral and political commitments are not rationally required but are instead matters of immanent choice. That makes sense, but do you ever also feel that the absence of a rational foundation for politics and morality makes one's choice of comrades arbitrary, taking politics and morality seriously a little absurd, and the use of any degree of force in pursuit of (arbitrary, a bit absurd) political and moral commitments grotesque?
I think your answer to these questions is a hearty and possibly indignant "no." How, then, do you resist the turn to enervating irony as the reaction to your conclusion that morality and politics is a matter of immanent, non-rational choice? Do you pay attention to the particulars --- this person hungry for something to eat juxtaposed against that person's gala in the Hamptons --- and let the connection of those particulars with your connative set motivate you? But then how, in your more reflective moments, do you not feel that that kind of particularism is disreputable.
And another, related question: how do you escape from deeply sympathizing with those of your opponents in the moral and political struggle who have likewise realized that politics and morality are matters of immanent choice? How do you resist feeling communal affinities for those who repudiate the cloying, over-earnest project of rationalist morality, no matter what substantive political banner they contingently happen to rally around?"

These are extremely thoughtful and interesting questions.    Although I would never describe myself as "hearty" and tend to be angry rather than indignant, My response to the questions in the first paragraph is indeed "no."  As for the question in the second paragraph, I simply never find myself seduced by "enervating irony."  Having made a life choice of comrades, as I put it, I feel no temptation to retreat into ironic inaction.  I more or less constantly feel frustration at the direction the world seems to be taking, but Lord knows I am hardly a whirling dervish of activist engagement.  As I have often times observed, I would far rather write a book than go on a protest march -- soothing my feelings of guilt with the thought that someone needs to write books, and I seem to be pretty good at it.

I do indeed pay attention to the particulars, as MusingMarxist puts it, but I cannot for the life of me imagine why that kind of particularism would be disreputable.  Quite to the contrary, what I find disreputable is the ascent to generalities as an excuse for ignoring the suffering and injustice in front of one's face.  When I organized a small group of senior Philosophy professors to sign a letter I had written calling for the creation of a standing committee of the American Philosophical Association on the Status of Women in the Profession, I was responding to the blatant discrimination my then wife had suffered in her search for a teaching position in English.  I did not think the specificity of my motivation was any grounds for hesitation.  It was Jack Rawls' refusal to sign the letter at a time when he was engaged in the articulation of a grand global theory of social justice that I considered disreputable.

As for my opponents, I am quite capable, on a good day, of recognizing in them some affinity to myself, but that does not stop me from pounding them into the ground when I get the chance!

It may just be that I like to think of myself as a happy warrior.

A VALUABLE ARTICLE

Let me very strongly recommend this essay in The Atlantic by Richard Yeselson.  It is informative and deeply troubling.